Kwill FAQs

Kwill is a publishing house founded by Henry and Cate Baum, owners of indie author site Self-Publishing Review. Kwill is a registered publishing house in Spain, where the company operates internationally with US and UK expat staff. To see our offices, click here. To see our registration as a publishing house with ISBN and with the register in Spain, click here. To read about our team leaders, click here.

We can provide you with a hands-off experience. If you don’t have the time or energy to learn six thousand disciplines including editing, book design, web design, online marketing, search engine marketing, and Amazon algorithm “tricks” and all the software that goes along with all that, and you just want to write the book and be an author, then we can do that for you.

Unlike other services that say they follow this model, we are not a marketing service, we are a registered Publishing House. We actually do all your marketing for you as well – you are guaranteed to be an Amazon Top 20 Best Seller in your category and you will get between 10 – 35 naturally garnered Verified Customer Reviews. We don’t just give you a few worksheets. We help build all your pages and do all the campaigns for you. You will have a Bowker ISBN registered to Kwill Publishing House and you will be a published Author. This is not the case if you get a free ISBN with Createspace for example. We buy our ISBNs from Bowker and register your BISAC codes for libraries and bookshops so that you are discoverable as a published author, not a self-published author.

We use KDP and Createspace to produce books, simply because they are the best method to get seen online and have the best quality books when combined with our expert designers’ knowhow on formatting and cover design.

Kwill is a publishing house, so your Bowker ISBN will register you as a published author with Kwill. If you get your own ISBN, it costs $125. We include your ISBN in the price here at Kwill. A self-published ISBN, for instance with Createspace, will mean it’s clear you self-published and you will not be able to go into extended distribution later on using that ISBN.

Amazon’s KDP Select gives you the best promotional tools for your first three months. The mailing promotions that we developed at SPR will give you a guaranteed BestSeller status, which means you can then go on to develop an expanded distribution with Createspace for your print book after the three months, as well as options to extend distribution of your ebook with Smashwords. After that, we can do all kinds of jazzy stuff with free giveaways and price matching. Just ask.

We’ll be looking after you from edit to promotion. That means your cycle starts when you join and ends once you have spent the three months on KDP Select. You can then choose to extend into further distribution and print for one year. Either way, you will be a permanent Kwill author as long as you use your Bowker ISBN from us.

Yes, you could, but you won’t get the BestSeller guaranteed Top 20 listing, nor will you get the publisher ISBN from Bowker, so you’ll be treated as a self-publisher everywhere you sell your book. Many authors decide to do everything themselves, but sell very few books because they can’t really grasp book design, editing, book description, and building a following themselves on top of being an author. Have a click round Amazon and see if you can spot those authors. You’re paying us to do everything for you, and get results, by hiring trusted experts from each discipline to work on your book for you.

We haven’t given a refund yet in two years of using our method! But don’t just take our word for it. We guarantee it by contract on your invoice but also you will pay by PayPal, which has a Purchase Protection policy. See our recent results here – all authors so far have reached #1 in their category.

Yes and no. We will ask you to fill out a questionnaire telling us what you like and what you absolutely don’t want. From that, we will consider what kind of cover we will order for you from our database of trusted designers. We will give you a choice of two images to be used on your cover, and all items have tweaks available so you can have your say about the design. But we do reserve the right to run with the design we know will sell you the most books, and the cover we feel is of the highest quality.

We will give you your manuscript back with notes after the line edit. At this point, you will receive a viability report telling you what needs to happen to make your book commercially successful, and a report on the manuscript itself. You will be expected to go through this report and make necessary changes to your manuscript. Once this is complete, you will send it back to our editorial team, who will then proofread it fully before formatting it for publication.

We do not usually accept edits by other book editors for quality control reasons.

Henry and Cate run the office in Spain, where a large amount of English-speaking businesses are stationed. The Valencia office is perfectly positioned in Europe to attend book events and meetings in Paris, London, Barcelona, and Frankfurt.

We work with partner suppliers in Holland, UK, and Australia, as well as many in the US.

Verified Amazon Customer Reviews must not be bought, or in any way manipulated, so you are not buying reviews from us, nor are you paying us to buy copies of your book, because that would be against Amazon Guidelines.

We operate within Amazon Guidelines, and we have no control over the customer reviews your book receives.

Amazon has absolutely no rules about how much you advertise your book to readers (as long as this does not include any reviewers being paid to review your book), and in fact, they want you to advertise it as much as you can, so readers buy books from their website! So your marketing campaign is completely within guidelines, and in fact, more so than many other methods offered that bloggers often say are “safe and free ways to get reviews,” such as swapping books for reviews with other authors, offering goodies and incentives for reviews, or sending free copies out to review sites.

These methods can flag your account as being full of fake reviews and your book can suffer. Often this can happen if the author and reviewer can be proved to have made contact before the review is posted. Amazon will remove books from their listings if they find bought or partial review methods on your book account. This can also include methods such as asking people you know or on forums to leave customer reviews, which can be frowned on as partial opinion by Amazon. These are grey areas we want to keep away from.

This from Amazon Terms of Service concerning author swaps:

Authors are welcome to submit Customer Reviews, unless the reviewing author has a personal relationship with the author of the book being reviewed, or was involved in the book’s creation process (i.e. as a co-author, editor, illustrator, etc.). If so, that author isn’t eligible to write a Customer Review for that book.

Amazon Guidelines say you should not include the following:

• Sentiments by or on behalf of a person or company with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product (including reviews by publishers, manufacturers, or third-party merchants selling the product)
• Reviews written for any form of compensation other than a free copy of the product. This includes reviews that are a part of a paid publicity package*
• Solicitations for helpful votes

It is always best to have genuine customers, i.e. people you do not know at all, and have never spoken with at all anywhere either online or in real life, to leave reviews. This completely leaves you in the clear with Amazon Guidelines, which are stricter by the day. After all, customer reviews absolutely have to be impartial so Amazon can promise a genuine customer opinion.

*What we are concerned with pertaining to “a paid publicity package” is a situation whereby a company will write publicity for you, and pay copywriters to create copy that will then be purposed as Customer Reviews. Our package does not do this. We are simply advertising our authors as any other product online would, and every single review will be from a genuine customer who saw your book being promoted, bought the book, and wrote a review.

The paid reviews in this package are only featured as quotes in the Editorial Reviews section on your book page. This keeps you free of any problems or confusion about which reviews were written professionally, and which were written as a result of advertising your book by genuine customers.

Because of the horrid misunderstandings of what “hybrid” has come to mean in certain author circles, we do not describe ourselves as hybrid. We follow a traditional method of production, and we use KDP and Createspace as our printing press. This keeps overheads to a minimum and gives authors the best available exposure online, as Amazon gets three times more traffic than Google!

We do not give advances to authors. This is because even in the real world, an author must prove themselves before they get a book deal. A typical advance is between $2000 and $5000, which must be recouped in sales and costs before you would may a cent – and then your royalties are going to be something like 20% or less.

What we do instead is ask that authors pay for their costs themselves to our in-house team. We offer this is three different ways so that you can afford it. The most you will pay is $3999 all-in. After that, you’ll be into 100% royalties. Makes sense, huh?